Ask Slashdot: Automated Tool To OCR CCGs Like Magic: the Gathering?

An anonymous reader writes I buy massive collections of trading card games, Magic:The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, Weiss Schwarts, Cardfight Vanguard, etc, etc. And I've gotten the process fairly streamlined as far as price checking, grading, sorting, etc. Part of my process involves using higher-quality web cams positioned over the top of the cards which are in a stack. I keep a cam window on the screen to show a larger, brighter version of the card. What I'm wondering: Is there is an OCR solution out there that will look at the same spot on the screen, capture, ocr, dump to clipboard, etc.? I've tried several open source solutions but none of them quite fit my needs. What I'd really like is to be able to hit a hotkey, and have my clipboard populated with the textual data of the graphics in a pre-set x,y window range. All this should be done via a hotkey. I may be asking for a lot, but then again, I'm sure someone out there has had need of this type of set-up before. Anyone have any recommendations?

Comments

I don't have a solution

[halivar]

But I just wanted to say that you are perhaps the biggest nerd I have ever been aware of. I mean that as a sign of respect.

ImageMagick

[Anonymous Coward]

Grab an OCR system off of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OCR. Get ImageMagick. Get streamer (package xawtv). Create a script on the order of:

now=$(date --iso-8601=ns)
file=$now.png
outfile=$now-cropped.png
streamer -c /dev/video0 -b 32 -o $file
convert $file -crop 40x80+150+120 $outfile
gocr $outfile > $now.txt
rm $outfile

Now create a keyboard shortcut with your window manager to run this script, or open a terminal and get used to pressing up and enter a lot.

If you're not on Linux, sorry.

Re:ImageMagick

[Anonymous Coward]

This. He might be looking for a single monolithic program, but his problem is actually completely solvable with clever usage of UNIX. It's the perfect platform for creating a customized pipeline for this kind of task.

Also in 2 days it will be integrated into systemd.

Re:ImageMagick

[Anonymous Coward]

Which means it was already part of emacs.

Re:ImageMagick

[CronoCloud]

Or just have it run continously, snapping pictures every 8 seconds or so, then all they have to do is swap cards.

while true;do
echo "Preparing to scan new MTG card in 8 seconds"
for i in `seq 8 -1 1`; do
                echo $i
                sleep 1
done
now=$(date --iso-8601=ns)
file=$now.png
outfile=$now-cropped.png
streamer -c /dev/video0 -b 32 -o $file
convert $file -crop 40x80+150+120 $outfile
gocr $outfile > $now.txt
rm $outfile
done

Decked Builder

[DarrenBaker]

I use it every day. The Android app is phenomenal at picking the right card from the database based on the picture. The only real problem is that it doesn't have all the alternate art versions of cards from older MTG sets. The interface is a bit sloppy on the desktop version, but the recognition is pretty good.

Re:Why not get someone to make it for you?

[halivar]

I can tell you that when I lived in Germany, even if I was writing in German, I got the decimal notation wrong every single time. I was just too used to my way of doing it.

IDK

[ssam]

OMG WTF TLA OCR CCGs?

There is already shortcut for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Emacs: Ctrl + M + T + G. Also runs a Monte Carlo on the last 3000 cards scanned and outputs the optimal 60 card deck and registers you in the nearest FNM.

Re:Image Database

[Anonymous Coward]

And, as a bonus, that has application has already been done specifically for MTG cards. e.g. https://github.com/tenderlove/magic_scan

Re:Image Database

[hjf]

This is what I did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Tineye or similar?

[retchdog]

uh, you're thinking of cryptographic/non-invertible/fast-mixing/whatever hashes specifically. it's not exactly defined what a hash is, but generally it means a possibly many-to-one (i.e. lossy) function of data, usually with outputs of fixed (or parametrizable) size.

for example, an OCR is a hash; it (ideally) hashes images of arbitrary dimension into an output space of characters according to which one it most resembles; similarly for any other image recognizer.